PassSonar: Visualizing Player Interactions in Soccer Analytics
Democratized thanks to Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (both the book and then the movie adaptation), baseball and basketball have already gone quite far in the realm of sports analytics. Soccer is now also clearly in the place to take the next step, with a lot of work being done by companies like Opta and Statsbomb to explain and create analyses and statistical models.
Moreover, a small but growing community is advancing the boundaries and publishing influential work, coming forth with great ideas that have even been sometimes followed by professional clubs.
In this piece, we will take a look at one of the aspects of soccer analytics, PassSonar, a concept already known as “wagon wheels” in cricket analytics. One of the first to popularize this idea in the soccer field was Eliot McKinley, who developed and used them on Major League Soccer (USA) game data. Thanks to his tips, I was able to create ones for the European leagues. Nowadays, the PassSonar concept is going viral and other great enterprises like Football Whispers or now StatsBomb are also following the trend (see the recent piece from StatsBomb CEO Ted Knutson).
